What are the top browsers, operating systems, and devices? We looked at data from the top configurations of CrossBrowserTesting customers tested to give you better insight.

After looking at the millions of browser and operating system configurations our customers have tested in 2018, 100 reign supreme. These results have come from a mix of people in different roles, industries, and company sizes, showing us the most commonly tested configurations out of 1500+ choices.

If you’re trying to decide which browsers and devices to test, this data should give you more to consider when it comes time to pick. Whether you’re testing in 5 browsers or 500, keeping in mind some of the most commonly tested configurations will help you outline a strategy for testing.

Top Takeaways

The top 100 combinations make up 68% of total tests – One hundred configurations may seem like a lot, but there’s more where that came from. We have thousands of browser/OS/device combos that extend well beyond this view. However, the top 100 does make up the majority of our customers’ browser testing, so it gives up a good benchmark of common trends and patterns.

The top 100 browsers include Chrome, Safari, IE, Edge, Firefox, and Opera – These are the 6 major browsers, so it’s not surprising that they’re the most common choices. It’s important to note, however, that our customers are not only testing on the latest versions of these browsers. By includer older browser versions in your testing, you get a more complete understanding of whether your application works for both Chrome users that are quick to update to the latest browser as well as those who might prolong it and be a few versions back.

Only Chrome and Safari are tested on mobile OSs – Unexpectedly, people most often test Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android. However, in this data set, there are ranges of browser versions and device models. If you are keeping your mobile testing limited to mobile Chrome and Safari browsers, make sure to keep older versions and diversified devices in mind. Keep in mind that the mobile browser share of your users may differ depending on where your users are. For example, internationally, UC Browser and Opera Mini will be more popular on mobile. It’s always good to use an analytics tool in order to get an accurate representation of your user base.

The #1 most tested browser/OS is Safari 11 in Mac OSX 10.13 – While Safari isn’t overwhelming in browser share, this Mac OSX and Safari combo is the most commonly tested configuration. Most likely, this means a lot of testers aren’t on Mac or Safari together and realize it’s a common configuration.

The most tested browser is Chrome – Considering Chrome is the most popular browser, this makes a lot of sense. The most commonly tested version is actually an older one with Chrome 43 hitting the #2 spot, but throughout the top 100 most people are testing in 63 or higher. It’s evident that people are testing on older Chrome versions and recent versions, which is good, especially being as popular as it is.

For mobile browsers, people are testing the most in Safari 8 – 11 – Again, we’re seeing that not only are people testing on a range of mobile devices, they’re also being mindful of testing older versions of those browsers. For mobile Chrome, we see users go back as far as 58. Especially with mobile devices, not everyone may be updating as soon as it’s available, and it’s important to keep this in mind with mobile testing.

The most popular mobile browser is Safari 10 on iPhone 7 – Here’s Another data point that shouldn’t surprise too many people. This configuration makes it into the top 10 most commonly tested browsers. Since this is one of the most common mobile devices, it goes to show that people are aware of these trends and including them in their testing strategy.

The second most often tested desktop browser after Chrome is Internet Explorer with the most popular version being IE11 and going back until IE9 – Internet Explorer is a consistent problem for developers and testers alike. Although it may not be the most widely used browser, the fact that it is highly problematic means it deserves a spot on your browser roster. It’s apparent that our customers know this, too.

Most popular mobile OS is iOS with iPhone 7 being the most popular device, followed by the nexus 6p on Android 7.0 – Most people are testing iPhones and the most recent models at that. This is because, unlike the fragmented Android market, most iPhone users will be using the most recent devices and operating systems. This is ideal because it means you can cover a larger portion of your user base without testing on too many iOS devices. However, as you dive into mobile testing, make sure you include Android phones too. Although their users are more diversified, it’s good to get a base to understand of the Android users’ experience.

While it’s popular for mobile, Safari desktop browser only appears 3 times in the top 100 – Safari is predominately tested on mobile devices, but not often tested on desktop Mac OSX and only appears 3 times in the top 100 despite also being in the #2 spot. Although Safari is the default browsing option for Mac, similar to iOS, it seems that people tend to download Chrome and use it more often on Mac OS than iOS. If you are testing on Mac, it’s probably best to test in both Safari and Chrome, since we are aware that users are on both and others test both.

Twenty-six of the top 100 configurations are mobile, 5 are tablets – When it comes to mobile testing, it can be confusing to know how many devices to add to your mix, but this gives us a pretty good idea — about 25% should be mobile. This, of course, is not an exact number and it should be based more heavily on your users and application — if you see high mobile traffic it should be higher, and vice versa — but it gives you a good starting point. Use this as a benchmark, and make sure to include iOS and Android with different browsers or models, as well as a few tablets, which will be telling when it comes to responsive design and verifying the way your application looks on different screen sizes.

Customers are testing as far back as Windows 7 OS and Mac 10.11 – Not only are our customers testing older browser versions, they’re also testing older OS versions as well. This is important because while new browsers are coming out the time, there are also regular OS updates that not everyone will do. Keeping these older operating systems in mind while testing will give you more insightful and accurate browser testing.

Conclusion

Our customers seem to have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing when it comes to browser testing. From the Top 100 data, we can see that users are testing the most popular browsers, operating systems, and devices to cover large market shares, but they’re also testing older versions to account for people that may not update right away.

As you approach testing in your organization, keeping these takeaways in mind will guide you to account for the most significant coverage. This way, no matter whether users visit your website on IE or Chrome, iPhone or Android, Mac or Windows, you can be prepared to provide the best experience possible to everyone.

Touch Screen – Scrolling, clicking, and swiping are different when you’re using your fingers compared to a computer mouse. You want to perform a variety of these actions throughout your application to ensure that you can do everything on mobile that you’re able to do on a desktop and that it functions with the same accuracy. Are buttons big enough to click? Is it easy to scroll from top to bottom and back? How does it look when you zoom in or out? Does swiping work without too much lag? These considerations will be critical in assessing usability.

Keypad – Rather than they keyboard we’re all used to, mobile devices have much smaller on-screen versions that also use touchscreen technology, which can pose a difficulty to users. Because they’re generally less user-friendly, you want to look at instances that might use require the keypad such as search boxes. Pay special attention to form fields to make sure they’re not too narrow or hard to use. You don’t want your users becoming frustrated because of a keypad that makes using the app impossible.

Navigation – Many times certain navigations will be different for mobile compared to desktop because of the smaller screen space. For example, where a drop-down menu might normally be labeled “Menu” on the web application, it might turn into a hamburger menu on a phone screen. Ensure that these icons and elements are organized in a way that makes their function apparent to the user. Because some of these navigation items may be less obvious, you want to go through and make sure that you’re still able to accomplish the same journey.

Portrait and Landscape – When you’re testing on a desktop, the web page will always be horizontal. Mobile phones are most often in portrait mode, but they can also be turned to view in landscape. Visual testing will allow you to evaluate and compare responsive layouts to make sure images, text, media, and other content is digestible in both portrait and landscape modes on mobile.

Devices – It’s not enough to test on one mobile device — in fact, you should probably be testing a selection of devices. Because of mobile fragmentation, different models, brands, screen sizes, and resolutions mean different mobile experiences. Additionally, you want to test on both iOS and Android operating systems to get a better understanding of how it differs for each.

Performance – Performance may be in good shape on your desktop, but that doesn’t mean it’s consistent for mobile. When 85% of mobile users expect pages to load as fast or faster than on the desktop, testing for performance is not something you want to skip. Test out different pages and record their load time. You also might want to test out different networks, locations, and even battery charges to see how it affects speed.

Popups and Alerts – Checking pages that have popups and alerts is important because while it may look fine on a desktop, it could be intrusive on mobile. Alerts that are too large and unresponsive or popups that are layered over each other may even make the app unusable. Additionally, it’s a good idea to see how phone calls, notifications, and other interruptions affect the functionality application.

Once you know which devices you want to test on, you can build out a more comprehensive mobile testing strategy. Keep in mind the ways that devices differ, both from each other (tablet vs Android vs iPhone) and from desktop, to determine which test cases you should focus on during exploratory testing.

Your users aren’t ditching their devices any time soon. Exploratory testing on mobile devices means that you can better understand how users interact with your application.

It’s no secret that testing an application solely on the machine it was developed on isn’t the best way to know whether or not it’s cross-compatible. Once you decide between building or buying a device lab, there still comes the issue of deciding which browsers to test. After all, you can’t test everything.

That’s exactly why we’re outlining the best methods for picking which browser, operating systems, screen sizes, and devices are going to be most beneficial to your team in testing. By choosing the configurations to account for as many users as possible, you can form an intelligent desktop and mobile testing strategy.

Analytics

Google Analytics is a precise method of finding online user data because it looks at who’s actually coming to your website and how.

To get a list of the devices your users on on with Google Analytics, you’ll want to go to “Audience” on the left side, click down to “Mobile”, and then click “Devices”.

This will show you how many people are visiting your application on what kind of mobile device, and you can get more information by setting a secondary dimension to view additional data such as service provider, operating system, mobile brand, and screen resolutions.

Additionally, you can go to “Overview” under “Mobile” and set the Secondary Dimension to “Browser” to see find out what browsers are being used on desktops, mobile devices, and tablets.

You can also find out what browsers your customers are using by going to “Technology” under “Audience” then clicking “Technology” and “Browser & OS”.

Click “Operating System” as the Primary Dimension and set the Secondary Dimension to “Browser” for the most common configurations. Set the Secondary Dimension to “Browser Version” when on “Browser” as the Primary Dimension for more specific browser data that will tell you how what version users have.

As far as understanding your users goes, this information gives you the most accurate glimpse of the devices you should be testing on. Make a list of some of the most popular browser, operating system, and device combinations to prioritize during testing.

You can also use other analytics engines, such as Mixpanel, to get an understanding of which environments your users are on.

Most Popular Browsers and Devices

While Google Analytics is a great way to understand the current users that come to your website, it’s not very predictive nor does it account for your potential users.

Because of this, it’s a good idea to include a few of the most popular browsers and devices even if they aren’t seen on your analytics list. If a high number of people use them, it’s logical that you want your web application to support them as well.

You also may want to think about popularity by regions. If you your organization is international, you will probably want to prioritize Samsung phones when thinking about testing mobile devices, for example, since they lead in worldwide popularity. However, if you’re customer base is mainly located in the United States, you’d want to focus on testing Apple products.

Of course, this will continually change from country to country and might even change month over month, so you will want to continuously check the market share for your target market.

Testing the Old and the New

You also have to keep in mind when looking at analytics and that sometimes they’re more prone to show up in a report because the web application is actually optimized for them, so it makes sense that people will visit your site and come back if the page already works for them.

If you really want to touch all the bases, it’s important to include a few old browsers. Older browsers and devices are going to be more problematic, so while it’s good to check popular models, you also want to test on ones that are less popular but still capture a percent of your users.

You also have to consider devices that may be new to the market. While the number of devices you have now may seem like it could get the job done, new devices come out on the time. If your users have them, you want them too.

The new iPhone X is one case where testing would be important. Up until this year, Apple’s iPhones have generally taken on the same design with a few slight changes. The iPhone X was a big deal when announced because of how different it looked due to a larger screen that had a lack of bezels formerly seen on the front.

Additionally, the notch at the top of the screen has proven to be an issue during visual testing, so running your web application on a iPhone X simulator would be a smart move to avoid unfortunate design issues.

Learn from CrossBrowserTesting Customers

Our customers are pros when it comes to cross-browser testing. Recently we looked at some of the most popular browsers, operating systems, and devices our customers have been testing on this year. We found some trends and patterns in this data, as well as some really interesting insights on what they prioritize in testing.

After looking at the millions of browser and operating system configurations our customers have tested in 2018, 100 reign supreme. These results have come from a mix of people in different roles, industries, and company sizes, showing us the most commonly tested configurations out of 1500+ choices.

Whether you’re testing in 5 browsers or 500, keeping in mind some of the most commonly tested configurations will help you outline a strategy for testing.

Problematic Browsers

When thinking about doing a risk analysis of our applications, we want to test pages that get high traffic and business crucial functions, but we also want to test areas that we know are problematic in order to avoid expected downtime. The same is true with browsers.

While you may find that your users are saturated on the most recent versions of Chrome and Safari but you also acknowledge that your application has difficulties in another browser, it’s probably a good idea to add that configuration to your mix.

Internet Explorer, for example, may not take up a large portion of your user base, but it’s known to be one of the most problematic browsers. You may understand that Chrome, Safari, or Firefox is a better browsing option, but someone that isn’t as familiar with technology might still be using a past version of IE on an older OS, and you may want to check that your web application still works despite their outdated machine.

Even if you aren’t running tests on 100 browsers every regression, it’s a good idea to do some exploratory testing and visual testing on a wide array of browsers and operating systems in order to get a better understanding of which ones are most likely to create issues for your team.

Sample List

Still don’t know where to start? Choose how many configurations you want to test and follow our testing guide based on these combined factors.

After 25 years of extreme consumerism had eroded any concept of customer support or service in the modern buyer, it has been wonderful to see the renaissance of customer-centric products and marketing strategies popping up seemingly everywhere. Never before has the consumer had so many options, forcing companies to keep with up with high-quality customer support or simply perish.

Companies like Zappos and Starbucks have literally built billion-dollar brands on the back of their customer service. As software grows and becomes even more ubiquitous in our everyday lives, tools like Intercom and Zendesk make it easier than ever for the customer to communicate their feedback. Where “world class support” used to be a generic term thrown on the footer of your website, actual support engineers, with highly technical skills ( like ours!), are now key product differentiators for many businesses.

But this acute growth of feedback and service between customers and customer support teams has not gone without its headaches or hurdles. The rise of ticketing systems has been anything but graceful, bug reproduction is getting enormously more difficult, and communication between support, product, and development teams now is a focal growing pain of many businesses.

Reproducing Customer Bugs Issues.

The biggest challenge for many customer support representatives at SaaS or web companies is accurately reproducing bugs, or features, that customers are complaining about. With brick and mortar stores, or more traditional service companies, customers have a finite way of accessing and using the information; whether it be a kiosk or mail delivery, there are only so many things that can go wrong when customers buy shoes from an outlet mall.

When today’s digital consumer demands meet the fast pace of the digital age, the gravity of online customer support is increasing as web applications, features, and updates are constantly released. However, because the proliferation of devices and different browsers, it can be difficult for customer support representatives to replicate the bugs customers call in with or write a ticket for.

When the day comes that your customers find a bug on a device that you don’t have, it’s pretty hard for you to replicate the problem unless you want to expedite their exact machine via Amazon overnight or fly your developer to the customer site. And sometimes, you can’t fix their problem without having the same device in front of you. This is where CrossBrowserTesting’s 1500+ browsers and devices come in handy <– we even have Windows XP IE 6, a reps worst nightmare.

Internal Ticketing Systems For External Problems

Often times when customers take support tickets out, they write minimal descriptions about what they were doing, what error they received, or what browser they are using. While many support tools capture important data from the browser or console, most do not and you may not even be using one. It is important that during the first few exchanges between a rep and customer that some necessary data is procured:

The beautiful thing about using a tool for cross-browser testing in the cloud, of course, is the unmatched access to thousands of device, browser, and operating system configurations at the drop of a hat. The best thing to do when a customer encounters and issue like this is to access a live testing session and offer test reproduction support. By going through the same steps that they went through in the same device via CrossBrowserTesting, your support team can approach their issues with the utmost accuracy.

While going through bug recreation, support reps have the ability to record their entire session, taking snapshots of problem areas and ultimately our error message or bug. Once the bug is documented in CrossBrowserTesting, you can share your test results through Slack, Email, or create a Jira ticket.

Communication Is Key

Replicating the test environment as closely as possible will assure that developers are able to reproduce the test as closely as possible to find the same bug your customers are encountering.

Previously, your developers would have to figure out how to rewrite test cases in order to reproduce the bugs with little information. By communicating with the customer and repeating the problem on their exact configuration, you can let them know where the issue originates with a definitive answer so they don’t have to wait for a solution and your developers don’t have to guess what went wrong.

By doing this, they know if there’s a problem with your application, a user error, or if it was the fault of the network configuration. You can also work with them to get the issues fixed faster.

Once your developers let you know that the new code is in place and the bug is fixed, make sure you test the solution yourself before firing off an email. There is nothing worse than sending a customer a “We Fixed It” only to have the bug still reproducible.

While customer support is becoming more difficult in the digital age – tools like CrossBrowserTesting can help alleviate the hurdles of the web. Reproducing bugs across environments will ensure that your application is optimized for the right devices, and more importantly, that your customer is satisfied, reducing the time it takes to recognize and effectively fix bugs or complications.